Sunday, March 25, 2018

Will Kaluga Oblast Decision Elevating Rights of Ethnic Russian Majority Become a Model? Nationalists Hope So

Paul
Goble

Staunton, March 25 – In December
2017, the Kaluga Oblast authorities issued a decree which for the first time in
recent Russian history supported a strengthening of the rights of the ethnic
Russian majority, an action that Russian nationalists are celebrating and hope
will become the basis for a decree or law for the entire Russian Federation.

The 3500-word decree issued “quietly
and without PR” represents, one Russian commentator argues, “yet another step away from ‘European
values’ toward a normal existence and is thus one of the most important
preconditions for the restoration” of the rights and privileges Russians lost
in 1917 (katyusha.org/view?id=9618).

Since December, this decree (full
text at vest-news.ru/files/docs/2017/12/727.docx)
has not attracted much attention not only because of the election campaign and the
usual obscurity of a predominantly ethnic Russian region like Kaluga but also because
it includes traditional language about guaranteeing everyone’s rights
regardless of ethnicity.

But the Katyusha commentator says
that the key provision of the document is that it calls for taking account of
and guaranteeing “the rights of the ethnic Russian people as a national
majority,” something most recent Russian documents on nationality policy have
been careful to avoid in their talk about a non-ethnic Russian civic nation.

The
Kaluga document gives Russian nationalists many other things they want in
addition to this symbolic shift: it calls for preventing the formation of ethnic
ghettos, it says that ethnic Russians should be given preferential treatment as
immigrants, and it explicitly rejects multi-culturalism, saying that is a
source of conflict rather than concord.

“This
is really a breakthrough,” the Katyusha commentator says. “What is needed for
the normal existence of various peoples in a single state? If you listen to the
Europeans, a very great number of things are necessary and above all the
elimination of any identity of the local population and the destruction of
traditions.”

“But
as almost 20 years have shown, this path is a dead end, which has led to a
crisis in Europe,” but people there can’t escape it because under the terms of “global
liberalism,” there is no other way and they are condemned to follow it. “Everyone
who doesn’t agree is an enemy of democracy and humanity.”

“There
is another approach,” and it is one that Russia appears to be moving towards,
the Russian commentator says.“Like no European
nation, we have our own experience of peoples living together who aren’t
slaughtered like Indians or enslaved like Negroes.”

“Today,
Russia has become the world brand namely of this – traditional – approach to
the resolution among other things of the inter-ethnic issue,” he continues. One
can thus only welcome the decision of the Kaluga authorities and hope that its
choice will be “only the beginning of history.”